Poetry
Danielle Mckinney, Mercy (detail), featured in AGNI 103
Featured
Vanished Qilou Building, Bali
Its Manchurian windows have vanished.
The parapets, verandas, arches, cornices, railings, balconies,
triangular plum blossoms proudly growing from its walls,
the cat living in the staircase, the rain on the street . . .
The Head of Goliath
And like Caravaggio, I am my own savior
rent by my own hand. Depicted:
A younger version of the painter heeds
Explaining the Joke
When I told the clown joke to Nelson, he said,
“The scary part is, how do they know he’s a clown,
not just some guy dressed up in a clown suit?”
The Rapture is Happening Slowly, One at a Time, to Everyone
In an advertisement for a sex pill, the various couples enjoying pre-sex activities / (riding in a hot-air balloon, bowling, clinking their glasses of wine) may be—are they?—
Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing
Nimble, protean, an adoptee has an awareness and creativity that converse with constellations, manifold possibilities unbound by known origins. This liminality risks oblivion. Yet to imagine ourselves inside this everywhere that may be nowhere is to stake and take up space—here, I am here—even after untranslated documents, deathly embraces, a roll of shaved dice. We are here—resplendent and alive.
From the Archive
Sunnyside Road
Hot Summer
Lost Love Lounge
Every year a new hat
with a new head in it.
It happens in June,
these ritual murders of himself,
these large, continuous births.
He shows up at our house and says
the man we knew went out of style,
and introduces himself anew.
Each time it gets easier for us;
he’s the new book by an author
we’ve learned to trust: we buy it
because we’re buying him.